Support Portal best practices

To get your support issues resolved quickly and efficiently, we recommend that you follow these best practices when you create a support case:

Understand the scope of Sitecore Support service and other support policies.
Sitecore Support is designed to assist Sitecore Customers and Partners in resolving technical issues while using or implementing Sitecore software.
Sitecore Support team is not able to assist with web site administration, does not provide implementation assistance, or consulting services.
Before opening a support case, review the scope of Sitecore Support service as well as other available sources of help:https://kb.sitecore.net/articles/463549#ScopeOfSupport

Investigate the issue before creating a support case.
Before creating a support case, review Sitecore logs for any errors or warnings. Tools such as the Sitecore Log Analyzer can help you do that.
Search for specific errors, warning messages, or general questions on the internet, as many solutions are provided on sites such as Sitecore Knowledge Base or shared by Sitecore community.

Report one problem per support case.Only report one problem per support case with only one reproduction scenario. If you think that two or more cases are related, mention this in the problem description.

Provide scenarios that you can reproduce in a clean environment.
In most situations, Sitecore Support needs to reproduce the issue in a local environment to find the resolution.
Providing scenarios that you can reproduce in the clean environment can significantly reduce investigation time and the number of responses and answers needed to fix the issue.
Alternatively, you can set up your own test environment where you can reproduce the issue and provide Support with remote access to it.

Provide information about your Sitecore installation, such as configuration and log files.
The How to collect basic information about your Sitecore installation article describes how to collect website configuration details and share them with Sitecore Support.
This information helps find better answers to your issues and reduces the resolution time. If this information is not provided with the initial request, Sitecore Support will likely request it from you later, delaying the resolution of the issue.
It is also important to be extra careful to provide information from the exact environment where the issues are observed. Otherwise, this can lead investigations in the wrong direction.

Describe your Sitecore environment architecture.
In many situations, understanding your Sitecore environment architecture is critical to properly identifying, reproducing, and resolving the issue. Whenever possible, provide an environment architecture diagram or some other way to explain how your Sitecore instances are set up.

Provide information about the severity of the issue.
To attend to most important support issues as quickly as possible, Sitecore Support internally prioritizes all support cases. To do this, the team uses information from the support case such as the affected environment, business impact level, and problem description.
Make sure these fields always contain the correct information about the severity of your issue. For important project milestones, please provide information about expected deadlines whenever possible.

Provide a license that corresponds to the specific project related to the issue.
For Sitecore partners, you should use your Customer license to open cases instead of your Partner license. Proper license information allows the Support Team to work on multiple support cases as a single group, as well as determine the associated support plan.

Report any exceptions with full details.When you report an exception, attach all the information about it in plain text or HTML format. Do not attach a screenshot with the exception stack traces because they normally do not contain the full information about the error.

Attach files to the case or upload them to the Sitecore Support file storage.
You can attach a file smaller than 50MB directly to the current support case. For larger files the Sitecore Box storage should be used.
All available options of exchanging files with Sitecore Support are listed in the How to provide files to Sitecore Support article.

Provide feedback using the support satisfaction survey.
Whenever a support case is closed, a satisfaction survey email message is automatically sent to the creator of the case. Responses provided via such surveys are reviewed and analyzed very carefully to understand current feedback and discover new ways to improve the support service. When receiving such a survey, please spare a few minutes to provide feedback to the support team and share any relevant details about the current support case as well as ideas for future improvements.

Following these simple guidelines will ensure that your case is handled in a timely fashion and will most likely result in a quicker resolution.